Voting for No One. Subnational Politics and Invalid Votes in Argentine Presidential Election

Does the fiscal architecture of subnational government shape how citizens vote in national elections? This paper argues that fiscal correspondence is a systematic determinant of deliberate invalid voting in Argentine presidential elections through an attribution channel. In provinces where public spending is financed predominantly by automatic transfers determined by law, voters cannot connect fiscal outcomes to electoral choices, the transmission chain from presidential ballot to observable fiscal outcome becomes too opaque for rational voters to decode. Rather than casting a deliberate valid ballot, voters take the low-cost exit of depositing an invalid one. Using a balanced panel of 23 Argentine provinces across nine presidential elections from 1989 to 2023, I find that higher fiscal correspondence is associated with significantly fewer blank and invalid ballots. The effect is concentrated on blank ballots — deliberate protest votes — rather than null ballots, consistent with the theoretical prediction that the mechanism operates on the deliberate disengagement margin. Results are robust to instrumental variable estimation, exclusion of oil-producing provinces,and structural break tests around the 2001 crisis.